The French Experience in Mexico, 1821-1861: A History of Constant Misunderstanding

The French Experience in Mexico, 1821-1861

The French Experience in Mexico, 1821-1861:

A History of Constant Misunderstanding

by Nancy Nichols Barker

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 1979 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 78-12935

ISBN 0-8078-1339-7

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Barker, Nancy Nichols.

The French experience in Mexico, 1821-1861.

Bibliography: p.

Includes index.

1. France—Foreign relations—Mexico. 2. Mexico— Foreign relations—

France. 3. France—Foreign relations—19th century. I. Title.

DC59.8.M6B37     327'.44'072     78-12935

ISBN 0-8078-1339-7

To My Husband Stephen Barker Again and Always

Contents

Preface

1. Before Recognition: Bourbon Ambivalence (1821-1830)

France, Spain, and Mexico: The French Dilemma

A Monarchical Emancipation?

The Declarations of May 1821

The Early French in Mexico

Mounting Aggravations and Grievances

Toward Gunboat Diplomacy

2. Recognition and After: Orleanist Vacillation

The Decision to Recognize

Plus Ça Change, Plus C'est la Même Chose

Baron Gros and the Mexican Revolution of 1832

The Early Mission of Baron Deffaudis: A Display of Moderation

The End of Détente

3. Gunboat Diplomacy: The Pastry War

Blundering into War

The Reasons Why

The Failure of Post Captain Bazoche

The Victory of Rear Admiral Baudin

Balance Sheet

4. Franco-Mexican Doldrums: A Dangerous Drift

The Mexican Sick Man

A Side Show in Texas

The Mission of Alley e de Cyprey

Diplomatie Crosscurrents

The Battle of the Baño

Revolution Prevails

5. Intervention Foreshadowed: The Turkey of the New World

The Two Republics

The French Colony at Mid-Century

Sonora, the New Eldorado

The Two Napoleons and the Lengthening Shadow of the United States

The Last French Filibuster

6. The Maturation of the Grand Design

The Mission of Viscount Gabriac, Proponent of Intervention

The Ravages of War

The Intrusion of Affairisme

The Mission of Dubois de Saligny: An Affairiste at Work

In the European Courts

Conjonctures: The Decision Is Made

7. In Retrospect

Appendix: French Exports, 1827-1864

Abbreviations Used in the Notes and Bibliography

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

San Juan de Ulúa

Lucas Atamán

Louis Philippe

Admirai Charles Baudin

Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, chargé d'affaires to the Republic of Texas, 1840-1846

Antonio López de Santa Anna

Occupations of the French in Mexico in 1849

Napoleon III

Viscount Jean Alexis Gabriac

Duke of Morny

Jean B. Jecker

Alphonse Dubois de Saligny, French minister plenipotentiary to Mexico, 1860-1863

Preface

It is small exaggeration to say that Franco-Mexican relations in the nineteenth century have been known only as they pertain to the expedition of Napoleon III that placed the Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian on his ill-fated throne. This intervention of the 1860s has called into existence an enormous body of literature both popular and scholarly. Its sheer volume is attested by the publication by Martin Quirarte in 1970 of an entire book on the historiography of the Maxmilian affair that cites nearly three hundred works without even touching on periodical material.¹

Through the years I have myself been a worker of this seam from the time when, in my doctoral dissertation, I first encountered the Mexican expedition through the eyes of the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III. Yet the more I read of this literature, the more I realized that it (my own included) was too limited in one way or another to give adequate, reasonable explanations for the French intervention. Inevitably the emperor appeared as a dreamer (or schemer) who foolishly launched his country on a futile (and/or sinister) adventure that he should have recognized as folly from the start. But the emperor was in fact no fool. He was an intelligent, widely read man who was benevolently disposed toward Mexico. Why should he have blundered so badly?

The problem with most of the studies of the intervention is the narrowness of their focus. Usually they are confined to diplomatic history and to the decade of the 1860s with no more than flashbacks to the events of the War of the Reform in the late 1850s. Studies of Franco-Mexican relations in the years between 1821, when Mexico achieved its independence, and the Napoleonic intervention are virtually nonexistent. Much of the period was virgin territory without track or trace of a scholarly predecessor when I began to explore it. The few books or articles that exist are devoted to very short periods of time, such as those on the Pastry War of 1838-39 or the diplomatic study by William Spence Robertson, France and Latin-American Independence, on French relations with all of the Latin American republics in the 1820s.

Moreover, virtually all of the books on the Maximilian affair (even if written by a citizen of the United States) have been written from either a distinctly European or a distinctly Mexican viewpoint. The European-oriented authors frequently displayed a woeful ignorance of Mexican history. Their Mexican counterparts were no better grounded in their knowledge of the French scene. Not infrequently during the course of my research, I encountered French scholars working on the Napoleonic expedition who could not read Spanish and who saw no need to do so. On the other hand, it was not rare to meet with Mexican researchers who never used French sources and who were unable to distinguish between the Bourbon, Orleanist, and Bonaparte regimes. To them all French rulers were alike. This state of affairs is largely explained by Quirarte's conclusion, No European historian has ever been able to analyze with the necessary critical depth the riches of Mexican documentation related to the empire. For our part we must also confess that no Mexican historian has been able to plumb with any thoroughness the European and American archives necessary for a knowledge of the French intervention and the Second Empire.²

This study attempts to broaden and deepen our knowledge of French policies and attitudes toward Mexico by going back to the 1820s, moving methodically forward from there, and using a wide variety of materials, published and unpublished, on both sides of the Atlantic. It proceeds from the convictions that (1) the earlier, ignored decades deserve investigation in their own right and (2) a knowledge of their history is essential to understanding of the intervention of the 1860s. As luck would have it, I was well situated both academically and geographically to undertake this kind of endeavor. As a specialist in ninteenth-century French history I was accustomed to going to Europe for my sources and familiar with such great repositories as the Archives of the Ministry of French Foreign Affairs and the Austrian Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv. In Paris I came across the archives of the Mexican Embassy, an abundant treasure that has been all but ignored. As a resident of Texas I was close to Mexico and, even more important as it turned out, to the rich resources of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection of the University of Texas and the help of its learned staff. While I can have no hope that the resulting book has escaped the pitfalls of prejudice, conscious or unconscious, of its author, or that its coverage is anywhere near complete, I can at least say that the research is not limited to European sources. The book is French-oriented only in that its subject (deliberately so) is the French experience in Mexico, not vice versa. My aim has been to build, or to begin to build, a kind of scholarly bridge between the Old World and the New. Doubtless, critics will soon inform me if I have in part succeeded or if I have instead splashed down somewhere in between.

I have also tried to move outside the confines of diplomacy wherein virtually all of the existing scholarly works on France and Mexico are to be found. While diplomatic history is undeniably important to the knowledge of Franco-Mexican relations and constitutes a large part of this volume, it cannot tell the whole story. The attitudes and personalities (mentalités) of the French needed to be analyzed to see how they bore upon French behavior and reception in Mexico. French economic interests in Mexico deserved more consideration than they have received. Much needed to be found out about French subjects living in Mexico, who have indeed been the forgotten men, even though the intervention of the 1860s was taken, ostensibly at least, for the protection of their persons and properties. Who were these French? How many of them were they? (Here I needed the quantitative method.) How did they make a living? Were they remarkably trouble-prone or litigious? Were they somehow different from other foreigners resident in Mexico? These are some of the questions I was able to answer as I made the acquaintance of the French colony of urban little men in Mexico and in them uncovered an important generator of intervention. I found, moreover, that at times the interplay between the more or less constant economic and social factors and the changing scene of public policy and private intrigue yielded conjonctures of vital significance. If the result of these efforts is scarcely history in the manner of the Annales school, it nevertheless yields a French experience in Mexico wider than conventional diplomatic history would allow.

During the many years of research and preparation of material for this book I have incurred debts of gratitude to many individuals and institutions for their help. In France I owe much to Maurice Degros, Conservateur en chef, and to Georges Dethan, Directeur de la bibliothèque, of the Archives of the French Foreign Ministry, and to their staff, for facilitating my work over a number of years. I am equally grateful to Silvio Zavala Vallado, Mexican Ambassador to France, and to his staff, who went beyond the call of duty in permitting me to forage at will in the embassy archives, even though the embassy is not (or was not when I was there) equipped with a public reading room and my presence underfoot caused no little inconvenience. I also wish to thank my good friend Maurice Paz, Avocat à la Cour de Paris honoraire, who shared with me the fruits of his own remarkable research on Alphonse Dubois de Saligny and who has done so much in many ways to foster my work. The mayors of the towns of Bellême and Saint Martin-du-Vieux-Belleme in Normandy (where Dubois de Saligny lived in retirement and died), Denis Durand and the Count of Romanet, graciously supplied me with local lore and documents illuminating the furtive career of the French agent.

On this side of the ocean I am especially indebted to Nettie Lee Benson, for many years Director of the Latin American Collection (that now bears her name) and Professor of History at the University of Texas. For years she has done her best to guide me into the labyrinth of nineteenth-century Mexican history. She has read much of my work and offered valuable suggestions for its improvement. A number of the themes in this book were born in a graduate seminar on France and Mexico that we conducted jointly (to my great benefit) some years ago. To her should go most of the credit for what expertise in Mexican history I may possess. May she not be held accountable for my failings. I also wish to thank Jorge Flores Díaz, Jefe del Departamento del Archiv Histórico de la Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores (Mexico, D.F.) for permission to work in that archive and to his staff for their helpfulness and courtesy in facilitating my research.

Institutional help has been forthcoming in the form of grants from the American Society of Learned Studies and the University Research Institute of the University of Texas and also, from the last, in the form of two leaves of absence that permitted me periods of uninterrupted research. Quotations of crown copyright records in the Public Record Office appear by permission of the Controller of Her Majesty's Stationery Office. The editors of French Historical Studies, The Journal of Modern History, The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, and Hispanic American Historical Review have given permission to quote parts of my articles previously published in those journals.

Nor can I forget the many colleagues and friends who have come to my aid in various ways: Lynn M. Case, my mentor at the University of Pennsylvania, who is never too busy to help a former student; David Pinkney, Professor of History at the University of Washington and former editor of French Historical Studies, who read this manuscript in its entirety and offered constructive criticism, and saved me from not a few blunders; Warren Spencer, Professor of History at the University of Georgia; Laura Gutierrez, present Director of the Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection; Llerena Friend, Professor Emeritus at the University of Texas; Joe B. Frantz, Walter Prescott Webb Professor of History at Texas and former Director of the Texas State Historical Association; Tuffly Ellis, its present Director; James R. Buchanan, who did the map work; Ona Kay Stephenson, who skillfully typed the manuscript; and many others. Finally and above all, I am indebted to the apparently inexhaustible (but much tried) support and patience of my husband, Stephen Barker, to whom I am once again happy to dedicate my work.

Nancy Nichols Barker

Austin, Texas

Notes

1. Historiografía sobre el imperio de Maximiliano.

2. Ibid., pp. 113-14.

The French Experience in Mexico, 1821-1861

A MEXICAN VIEW OF THE FRENCH

Y[owr] E[xcellency] will be aware that love of glory and the desire of conquest have always been and are to this day characteristic of this people [the French].—Mangino to Mexican foreign minister, Í848

A FRENCH VIEW OF THE MEXICANS

[The Mexicans] would be the most despicable of all the people on earth if they were not the most ignorant and the most frivolous.—Gabriac to French foreign minister, 1857

1

Before Recognition: Bourbon Ambivalence (1821-1830)

[France is a] versatile, vain, rich and powerful nation; she desires to have relations with us, but on her own terms, and our policy must attempt to bring her to yield to the imperious voice of justice.—Rocafuerte to the Mexican foreign minister, 11 April 1826

France, Spain, and Mexico: The French Dilemma

Unquestionably it was unfortunate for the future of Franco-Mexican relations that Mexico achieved its independence from Spain while France was under the rule of the Bourbon monarchy. Louis XVIII, King of France, was a blood relation of King Ferdinand VII of Spain. The two monarchies had been allied ever since Louis XIV had placed his grandson on the Spanish throne in 1700. The Bourbon Family Compact of 1761, declaring that whosoever attacked one crown attacked the other, had given formal expression to their united defense of their possessions.¹ According to its terms, the monarchs could call on each other in perpetuity for military and naval aid. The ensuing revolutionary and Napoleonic upheavals, during which the Bourbons in both countries lost their thrones, had interrupted this supposedly permanent arrangement and had lent a strong impetus to the movement for independence in Mexico. In 1814 the traditional alliance between France and Spain was revived with the Bourbon restorations in the persons of Louis and Ferdinand. Under the rule of Louis, France could be expected to deny recognition of Mexican independence as long as Spain still claimed possession of her colony.

Louis had additional reason to oppose the revolt in Mexico. As a Bourbon, as king by the grace of God, he personified the principle of legitimacy. The younger brother of the unfortunate Louis XVI, decapitated in the French Revolution, he had spent twenty-two years of his life in exile before ascending the throne. He and his family had seen and suffered enough from revolution to oppose it from the heart wherever it occurred.

Yet to oppose the revolt in principle was one thing; to combat it in practice was another. Soon after Louis began his rule the separatist movement in Mexico had achieved such undeniable importance that it could no longer be ignored. In February 1821 Augustín de Iturbide published at Iguala a plan of independence that was accepted by his army. By this project Mexico was to become an independent monarchy under a prince of the Spanish ruling dynasty. Louis was enough of a realist to recognize the limits of the possible. After a generation of foreign and civil wars on the Continent, France was impoverished and deeply divided in its body politic. Even had the king been so inclined, he was in no position to lead a crusade across the Atlantic to restore Mexico to colonial status. Even as early as 1821 there is evidence that his government was beginning to recognize the irreversibility of the revolutionary movement in Latin America and the necessity of adjusting to it.²

Moreover, an independent Mexico appeared to offer commercial opportunities that France could ill afford to pass up. The French loss of much of their colonial empire in the eighteenth century and the subsequent revolutionary and Napoleonic wars had spelled disaster for French commerce. During the prolonged hostilities the British navy had swept the French merchant marine from the seas. French Atlantic ports and Marseilles had become economic deserts. Under the Bourbon restoration French merchants, overjoyed with the return of peace, looked with avidity to the former Spanish colonies as outlets for their exports to remake their fortunes.³ While under Spanish rule these countries had been prohibited from direct trade with Europe. French trade with them had amounted to a trickle, conducted indirectly through Cádiz. Newly independent, they appeared to offer limitless compensation for French colonial losses in Haiti and Louisiana. The French government could promote and protect this nascent trade by establishing French agents and consuls in Mexico and negotiating a treaty of commerce. On the other hand, if Louis held aloof and declined all intercourse with the rebellious colony, as principle dictated, he would have to stand by helplessly while other maritime powers, especially his archrival, England, forestalled French traders in these new markets. The Mexicans could be expected to discriminate against French merchandise and merchants and perhaps to exclude them from the country altogether. Few French merchants would dare to enter so risky a commerce. France had already lost out too many times in maritime competition with England deliberately to deny herself entrance to this vast new market.

Yet what was to be done? The well-known obstinacy and shortsightedness of Ferdinand offered little hope that he would accept the Plan of Iguala and preserve some tie with Mexico. Moreover, a revolutionary outbreak in Spain in 1820, led by Rafael de Riego, was gaining strength and posing a real threat to his throne. After he had been compelled to proclaim adherence to the liberal constitution of 1812, which he abhorred, he had appealed to Louis for armed intervention in his behalf. In April 1823 a French army under the Duke of Angoulême, nephew of Louis, crossed the Pyrenees and quelled the uprising with little difficulty. On Ferdinand's urging it remained in occupation until 1828. Louis's action in the Iberian peninsula served further to restrict French freedom in the New World. He could not move in the direction of recognition of Mexico, still claimed by Spain, while his troops were protecting the Spanish throne in Madrid. At the same time, he incurred the ill will of Mexico and risked reprisals against his commerce. The Mexican government took the position that by maintaining troops in Spain, France was liberating Spanish ones that could be used to reconquer Mexico.⁴

A Monarchical Emancipation?

To the French government, the best way out of this dilemma appeared to be the creation of a Spanish appanage in Mexico. If Ferdinand could be persuaded to place an infante on a Mexican throne, the principle of legitimacy would be left intact. At the same time France would be free to establish diplomatic relations with the new monarchy and to promote her trade.⁵ The solution was the more attractive as it was judged easy of attainment. European statesmen were virtually unanimous during most of the nineteenth century in believing that Mexico could offer little resistance to their forces. The Duke of Wellington, whose military judgment certainly was among the best in Europe, did not doubt that even Argentina, the most stable of all the former Spanish colonies, could be recovered by Spain with ten thousand men in a matter of weeks.⁶ Mexico was thought to be an easier target, since Cuba was available as an operating base. If only Mexico were emancipated from Spain, the French ambassador in London, Prince Polignac, told George Canning, a Spanish prince at Havana with five or six thousand men would soon be on the throne of Montezuma.⁷

In promoting a monarchy in Mexico at this time Louis had no idea of making a French colony out of Mexico or of sending out an immediate member of his family. The painful shortage of princes in the French Bourbon line would have precluded such action even had he entertained it.⁸ Unable to sire children himself, the king depended on the Count of Artois, his younger brother, and the future Charles X, to continue the line. But of Artois's two sons, one, Angoulême, was likewise afflicted with the intermittent Bourbon curse of sterility and the other, the Duke of Berry, had been assassinated in 1820 while apparently without a male heir. When seven months later the widow gave birth to a son, the so-called Miracle Child became the sole hope of the continuation of the line. Angoulême was the only French Bourbon of an appropriate age to rule in Mexico but, owing to the advanced age of his father, he could assume that in the not-too-distant future he would ascend the throne of France. It was unthinkable that he should embark on an adventure overseas.

Throughout the 1820s the French government repeatedly advised Ferdinand to furnish a prince for Mexico, becoming most insistent during the years 1823 and 1824. The Ultras, led by Artois, were then on the ascendant, partly because of the advancing senility of Louis. They strongly desired to intervene in Spanish America if possible. When French troops entered Spain in 1823, Count Jean-Baptiste Guillaume Joseph Villèle, chief minister of the king, outlined in detail to Angoulême a plan by which France would supply the Spaniards ships, money, and troops (very few) thought to be sufficient to create appanages in Mexico, Peru, and Argentina.⁹ If the infantes should not find the natives submissive to their rule, it mattered little, wrote Villèle. They would at least find realms that could easily be subjugated by the aid of our navy and our credit. France would bear this expense and effort in anticipation of the commercial advantages that those sacrifices would assure her in the future.¹⁰

Villèle's project could not have gone into immediate operation, since the French fleet was concentrated off Cádiz and was required for the blockade of the Spanish coast. After the fall of Cádiz in October 1823 the scheme was taken up again and, according to Viscount François Auguste René Chateaubriand, the romantic literary genius then occupying the Foreign Ministry, pushed very far.¹¹ The presence of Angoulême and the French army in Spain could be relied upon to overcome the resistance of the captive Ferdinand. The monarchical emancipation of Mexico and other former Spanish colonies, wrote Chateaubriand, would have brought France to the pinnacle of prosperity and glory.¹²

Still, these plans came to nothing. George Canning, British foreign secretary, learned of the bruited intervention. Determined not to permit France to reassert her presence in the New World, he forcefully expressed the British displeasure and elicited from Polignac a formal statement of abjurement.¹³ Not long thereafter Chateaubriand lost the confidence of Louis and was abruptly dismissed. Of his monarchical designs in the New World he later wrote, Such was the last vision of my mature years: I believed myself in America, and I woke up in Europe.¹⁴

Visionary as these plans now appear, they did not seem so to contemporaries. They probably came closer to realization in the early 1820s than at any other time until the abortive intervention of Louis Napoleon in the 1860s. Little ideological objection could then be made, since the Mexicans themselves, to all appearances, desired a monarchical form of government. Prior to independence more than one plan for the creation of monarchies in Mexico had been proposed to the Spanish king.¹⁵ The Plan of Iguala of 1821 had called for a European prince. When Iturbide failed to obtain an infante, he had sent a delegation to Vienna to offer the crown to Archduke Charles Louis, Austrian general and field marshal.¹⁶ Subsequently, Iturbide used the plan to place a Mexican crown on his own head. European statesmen then, as later, took it for granted that a monarchy was a necessity for les races latines. Mexico had been under the rule of viceroys for centuries. It did not promulgate a republican constitution until 1824. Few republics then existed in the world, and those that did were regarded in ruling European circles as pernicious examples to be avoided rather than emulated. The very word republic brought back the still-fresh memories of the Reign of Terror and the bloody civil war of the French Revolution. Nor was the potential opposition of the United States to the introduction of a European prince in Mexico considered a deterrent. No European government as yet attached any importance to the Monroe Doctrine, for the material strength was still lacking to make it respected.¹⁷ Finally, early nineteenth-century diplomats could not have been expected to see anything inherently unrealistic in submission of Mexico to a foreign prince. The Congress of Vienna had only just finished moving kings about the map of Europe as though they were pieces on a chessboard, and ensuing decades saw many a prince accept a foreign crown at the dictation of the powers. It seemed only natural for the new and weak Mexican state to turn to the enlightenment¹⁸ of Europe for its guidance.

That the monarchical solution was not given a trial at this time was owing, on the face of it, to Ferdinand's refusal to admit the fait accompli of Mexican independence and his fear that the infantes might act too independently.¹⁹ Other powers ruled by legitimist monarchs—Austria, for example—declined to furnish princes to a state still claimed by its sovereign.²⁰ On the other hand, Ferdinand, dependent on the French army for his throne, surely could have been persuaded to cooperate had the French government been truly determined on a Mexican intervention. Why did France hold back, when the Ultras were keen on the project and when the general climate of opinion favored a monarchy? The French documents concerning Mexico in this early period are formal and offer little enlightenment on government thinking. But the real reason for her inaction, or at least a principal one, must inevitably have lain in her postwar exhaustion and her centuries-old rivalry with England. The expedition into Spain had cost a terrible effort. Even Chateaubriand was acutely aware of the dangers of a crusade in the name of legitimacy that might entail another contest with the British navy. It is easy to . . . enunciate legitimist principles, he wrote the French ambassador in Madrid in 1823, but when it is a matter of equipping vessels and of spending two hundred millions, as we did, in order to send one hundred thousand soldiers into action [in Spain], very little ardor is displayed. If France were to uphold Ferdinand's sovereignty in the New World, he continued, France would be left alone on the field, and we would lose our treasure, our fleets, and our colonies without any recourse.²¹ Obviously, France could not risk a war with England over Mexico. When Canning voiced his formal opposition to French deployment of force in support of an infante, and when England recognized Mexican independence in December 1824, the most auspicious moment for intervention had passed.

The Declarations of May 1827

While this flirtation with the infantes was going on, the French government was simultaneously moving timidly toward encouragement of a nascent French trade with Mexico and establishment of contacts with its leaders. During the French military action in the Iberian peninsula, French naval forces in the Antilles were instructed to regard colonial ships as nonbelligerents and to take no action against them.²² As early as 1822 the government had declared its willingness to admit Mexican ships in French ports if they kept their flags furled. Although this decision was a mere gesture, as no Mexican ship had yet appeared nor could be expected in the forseeable future, it was, to the Mexicans, an encouraging departure from legitimist principles.²³ In 1823 the French government sent out a special agent, one Lieutenant Samouel, in order to enter into relations with Mexico's political leaders and to offer French mediation in a reconciliation with Spain. Although Samouel's mission yielded no tangible result, it brought the French agent into personal contact with prominent Mexicans, among them Lucas Alamán, distinguished conservative statesman, one of the chief personages on the Mexican political scene until his death in 1853.²⁴ Working still farther out of the straitjacket of the Spanish alliance, Villèle in 1824 received a Mexican emissary, Tomás Murphy, as confidential agent in Paris with the mission of promoting and regulating trade between the two countries.²⁵

When Artois succeeded Louis as Charles X in the same year, he made no change in this pragmatic policy despite his leadership of the Ultra Right and his well-advertised doctrinaire rigidity. Probably he realized that the irreversibility of Mexico's separation from Spain was nearly impossible to deny. The promulgation of a federal, republican constitution by a Mexican congress in 1824, recognition of the new state by England late in the same year, and the capitulation of the Spanish garrison at San Juan de Ulúa in November 1825 gave the Mexican nationality an undeniable substantiality. Charles permitted the establishment of Mexican agents in the Atlantic ports of Bordeaux, Le Havre, and Nantes, and on the Mediterranean at Marseilles. As a further token of goodwill he announced that Mexican ships might henceforth fly their flags while in French ports.²⁶ Of more substance was the dispatch in 1826 of a salaried agent, Alexandre Martin, to Mexico as Inspector of French Commerce with permission to appoint other French agents (unsalaried) in Mexican cities as he thought appropriate.²⁷ Serving as the counterpart of Murphy in Paris, who was given a corresponding title, he was viewed by the Mexican government, eager to sign a treaty with France, as a forerunner of French consuls and agents of diplomatic rank.

In permitting these overtures the French government was reacting, however hesitantly, to the remarkable spurt in French trade with Mexico in the mid-1820s and to mounting pressure from leaders in commerce and industry. The surrender of the Spanish garrison at San Juan de Ulúa in 1825 had reopened the port of Veracruz, Mexico's major Gulf port. French merchandise, which had previously entered the country mostly in small coastal vessels from the United States via Tampico, whose harbor was too shallow to admit deep draft vessels, could subsequently be shipped directly to Veracruz in French bottoms.²⁸ According to the French newspaper Le Constitutionnel, French exports to all of Spanish America in 1824 had amounted to a mere one million francs. By 1826 the total value of French annual exports to Mexico alone soared to some twelve million francs.²⁹ Although these figures must be regarded as the roughest of estimates, given the existence of an already notorious contraband trade and the arbitrary values attributed to French goods, they are undeniable evidence of an important expansion.

The balance of this trade was heavily favorable to France. It was carried on in French ships with the value of French exports exceeding her imports from Mexico at a rate often to one for the years 1825 to 1827.³⁰ For French merchants Mexico was an outlet for textiles, wines and brandies, paper, and fancy goods (articles de Paris). In return they bought but small amounts of mahogany, pepper, coffee, vanilla, cochineal, and other exotic raw materials.

During this time the chambers of commerce of the Atlantic ports and Marseilles had often petitioned the government for the exchange of consuls and a treaty of commerce with Mexico. By June 1826 Murphy believed that their arguments had made a definite impression on Villèle.³¹ Bordeaux in particular took the lead in pressing the government on the path toward recognition of Mexico. The city had suffered most grievously during the long war with England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and in the 1820s was experiencing a feverish revival of activity. Isaac Balguerie, enterprising shipowner in Bordeaux, wrote to the members of the chamber of commerce in 1821, "[Mexico and] the vast continent of South America offers to our commerce and to our merchant navy a fine compensation